Browsed byCategory: Beekeeping

“Ace handed me a plastic bear full of his most recent harvest, and when I tilted it to my mouth, head back, eyes closed, I really experienced honey for the first time, standing next to its creators. In that glistening dollop, I could taste the sun and the water in his pond, the metallic minerals of his soil, and the tang of the goldenrod and wildflowers blooming around his meadow. The present golden-green moment was sweetly and perfectly distilled in…

I have been remiss in discussing what has gone on with my hives in my first year of beekeeping. There are pictures on the beekeeping page, but I have failed thus far to write a good description of the story. Long story short: my bees swarmed in early July. This is not normal behavior for bees in the first season when they are still filling out a hive. As near as I can tell, they overbuilt due to rapid weather…

When we moved into our house over four winters ago the one fruit tree on the property was an old apple tree. It was massively overgrown and had barely produced anything in years. I wish I had pictures of the progression (it’s what I get for not trusting the cloud!).

A decade after colony collapse disorder began, pollination entrepreneurs have staved off the beepocalypse. Source: How Capitalism Saved the Bees – Reason.com After years of believing the bee scare stories, I had the sense to become a skeptic several years ago. The economic value of bees is as such that beekeepers will figure it out, there are more colonies than there were ten years ago, and the price of honey hasn’t even gone up! Some emergency.

I made a million mistakes with the bees, had no harvest equipment, tons wasted I’m sure, but fresh honey is the most glorious thing ever. even compared to locally produced raw honey I can buy in the area, you have no idea how much better this is. My modest and sad haul from my freshman mistakes (but I have a bunch of wax!)

This was initially concerning with the broken comb incident earlier, I was worried it was a sign of a problem. Apparently they’re just beating the heat by hanging out on the front porch, and it is called ‘bearding’

Well checking the bees this morning went smoothly in some ways, less so in others. I actually put on proper equipment and had the smoker fired up the right now, and they were quite docile, which is nice. Unfortunately, my hive has been on an uneven level, which I thought was more or less fine, because around here its easy to give up on ever finding anything flat and I didn’t have a conveniently sized 2×4. So…